• There were many strange moments during the judging process for this year's Man Booker prize, but the strangest for me came when I and my fellow judges - Michael Portillo (the chair), James Heneage, Alex Clark and Hardeep Singh Kohli - were having lunch after the longlist meeting. Thanks to Michael's firmness, the decision-making had been quick - 40 minutes to select our favourite 13 books from 116 entries. Before the meeting, he had asked us all to submit our lists of top 10 favourites to him, without collusion. This process produced nine titles that received votes from the majority of the panel - in other words, three judges or more. Michael proposed that those nine had won their places on the longlist without further ado. That left only four places on the list to be debated.

The two novels on my personal list that didn't make it were People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks and Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay, both of which I loved, but I had to accept my enthusiasm was not shared. Books in the running for those last four longlist slots were ones that were voted for by one or two judges, but also partially admired by others who had not found room for them in their top 10. One such was Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, which scraped its way on to the longlist despite our shared reservations because of its evocative portrayal of a post-9/11 New York.

Netherland was first out of the blocks as bookies' favourite, and in the following weeks its author was splashed all over the papers beneath headlines that declared him "hotly tipped" to win. Not by us, he wasn't. The person this was most unfair on was O'Neill, who could have been forgiven for filling his ice box with champagne and rushing his tuxedo down to the dry cleaners. Next up as favourite was Salman Rushdie with The Enchantress of Florence, who had bunny-hopped on to our longlist with ease, only to be excluded from the shortlist four weeks later with equal unanimity. Booker judges snub Rushdie, or similar, was the headline in the papers. No, we didn't. We just thought the six books that did make it were better.

I went into the final meeting thinking that, although I would be happy for any one of our top six to take the prize, there were three that had nudged ahead for me, one of which was our eventual winner, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger. I was also entranced by Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture, a beautiful novel about an old lady in an Irish asylum reflecting back on her life. It wasn't that I didn't want The White Tiger to win, just that I didn't want The Secret Scripture to lose. At one point during our discussions, we double-checked with Ion Trewin, the chair of the prize committee, if we could split it. No, we couldn't. In the end, it came to a tense secret ballot and The White Tiger, a superbly executed novel about poverty and corruption in modern India, inched ahead of its competition. At which moment, we all paused to draw breath and blink at each other, suddenly silent after hours of impassioned and, at times, tearful debate.Louise Doughty

• So the government has retreated, for now. Although 42-day detention has been dropped from the counter-terrorism bill, the home secretary has said that the measure will be brought to parliament in a separate piece of legislation "if needed". When might that be? At a time when it might seem more effective as a piece of political posturing? None of this is about making us safer. It's about making the government look tougher. And while the current banking crisis meant that it was a good day to bury bad news on the climb-down, it's not too difficult to envisage another day in the future, after another terrorist incident, for example, when the priorities shift back. The government will be there shouting "we told you so".

It's possible to win the battle and lose the war. We already have provisions for 28-day detention without trial. That is more than twice as long as any other common-law country. Australia has the next longest, at 12 days. That we have already accepted the erosion of habeas corpus - the only true basis of freedom and democracy - to this extent is worrying. More vigilance is required.

• It is with difficulty that we pardon a man for being both great and illustrious. But we do so even less, if he combines these qualities, for being silent too. In the empire of noise, silence is a crime. The person who refuses to bare himself, to make public pronouncements above and beyond his work, is an annoyance and an obvious target. Milan Kundera has expressed himself fully in his work. He has talked about himself, about his life, in discrete pieces, inhabiting imaginary characters ("experimental selves"), examining our human discomfort and trying to discover a way out. He has never given in to the tacit demand that a writer should also be a guide, a philosopher (his essays are so many forms of questioning) a historian, or in a more pernicious way, a man who must justify himself.

As an individual, Kundera keeps himself, in solitude, to one side of his work, a fugitive from what he calls "l'événement": "What is an 'événement'? A news item so important that it attracts media attention. Yet a novel is written not to create an événement, but to make something which will last."

And now here is a document, a deposition dating from 1950, the authenticity of which no one is in a position to guarantee, dug up 60 years after the events which it describes and published all over the world, which arrives tragically to impose itself in the form of an événement.

"I was totally taken aback by this thing," he said, "which I did not expect at all, which even yesterday I knew nothing of, and which did not take place." I am infinitely touched by the awkward turn of phrase which combines in the word thing both the appearance of this police report itself and the act of which he is accused. But nevertheless something has taken place. What has taken place is the irrelevant media frenzy, the ambiguity of certain headlines, the appalling conditional tense ("may have denounced"...), even more sly and accusatory than a direct statement, what has taken place is the introduction of doubt, a stain, a shadow which has suddenly been cast over an exceptional life and work.

And above all, which is my reason for writing these lines, there is the absolute impotence of a man faced with such a chain of events. He has no possible response. Having made an immediate denial, anything he might say would only feed the process of accusation. In thirty seconds it is possible to sweep away the life of a man with an honest sense of having done one's job and one's duty. No serious inquiry is made, and most often no care in the broadcasting of information which itself is still subject to caution. Words are biassed towards the real. Spoken or written, they take unforeseen paths which can lead to destruction. They must be stopped in time. Yasmina Reza

• "They don't ban books any more, or at least not recently, which is a relief and a small step forward," I wrote in a preface to my latest book on Pakistan, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, after explaining how the previous two had been, at different times, banned by military dictators. I was wrong. I had foolishly assumed that since General Musharraf had not banned books, his civilian, supposedly democratic, successors would also stay the course. The Pakistani distributors of my publisher, Simon and Schuster, which had no problems selling ghostwritten volumes by Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto, have for the past four weeks been waiting for "clearance" from the ministry of information (ie propaganda) to import my book. The minister, Sherry Rehman, is a former Karachi journalist. Her public embrace of Sarah Palin notwithstanding, she had a reasonable civil liberties record, often preached the virtues of legality, political morality, civic virtues, freedom and equality. They lie now at her feet, broken and scattered shards as the government stumbles from one crisis to another.

Her friends tell me she is not responsible for the ban and is trying her best to "expedite clearance", but if not her, who? The man at the top these days, President Zardari, is well known as a semi-literate (by choice, unlike the bulk of the country) who has probably never read a whole book in his life.

I've received emails from many friends in Pakistan expressing delight: "what an honour to be banned by Zardari", "surely you realise the book will be smuggled in from India", "everyone will want to read it now", etc. My book is being translated into Urdu for publication in November. That edition does not require a clearance, but one can never be too sure in Pakistan. And in case you were wondering, the book is a very sharp critique not just of military dictators, but also of their civilian counterparts, whose corruption knows no bounds.Tariq Ali